Articles

The dark warnings of the Polish finance minister about the prospect of war in Europe if the crisis deepens were met with scepticism. But there is no call for complacency about where current, nationalist tendencies might lead, writes the editor of Adevarul Europa.

Is what is taken for critique today genuinely self-questioning or merely the confirmation of the moral consensus? In the neoliberal culture of the audit, has critique been deprived of its role as check on ideology? And does preference for impact-oriented research produce political compliance rather than independent critical thought?

The challenge is to find the words with which to counter the visions of purity harboured by the propagators of terror. Ola Larsmo on the recent spate of terrorist acts in Sweden and Norway, culminating in the massacre in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July.

The critique that Europe lacks representative legitimacy may well be correct, argues Ulrich Beck, but not when based on the principle of “no nation, no democracy”. Cosmopolitanization demands post-national approaches to democratic accountability in Europe.

Where the Mubarak regime was once the target of political graffiti in Cairo, now it is the interim council. But when there’s little to distinguish graffiti from burning flags, Yasmine El Rashidi is in two minds about its artistic value.

Freemarket disregard for the elementary moral truths of debt and obligation is to blame for the current crisis, says Roger Scruton. But the call for a return to economic morality is no endorsement of the financial fictions of the social democratic state.

Culture warriors like Anders Breivik style themselves as victims of an all-consuming political correctness administered by the “European elite”. Norway’s centre-right must confront its own role in the rise of this type of rhetoric, writes Jonas Bals.

It is high time to lift the aesthetic state of emergency that has surrounded witness literature for so long, writes Steve Sem-Sandberg. It is not important who writes, nor even what their motives are. What counts is the “literary efficiency”.

EU member states draw upon a reservoir of colonial discourse to assert superiority over the extra-European Other; western Balkan states compensate by turning the same discourse against neighbours lower down the ladder of EU accession, writes Tanja Petrovic.

A European patriotism can be generated only through political acts that create a sense of solidarity, says historian Pierre Manent. If invocations of Europe are to be anything but vacuous, Europe needs to be decisive in defining its interests and demarcating its boundaries.

The eurocrisis is a logical consequence of the way the Eurozone was constructed, writes John Grahl. A dogmatic belief in the intrinsic stability of market economies left competitive imbalances ignored as easy credit provided the illusion of growth. The current attempts to stabilise the Eurozone are inadequate: a Europeanisation of debt is necessary.

Isabel Hernández analyses the astonishing autobiographical account of the seventeenth century nun Catalina de Erauso: After having been forced by her family to enter a convent, she seized the first opportunity to run away and embarked on a long voyage. Dressed as a man, she travelled through Spain and then set off to South America where she enrolled in the Spanish army and actively participated in the colonization of the Americas – “entirely a masculine realm”, as Hernández puts it.

“Sometimes I think these people no longer care,” says the mayor of a small village in northeastern Hungary. “They have crossed every limit”. A reportage on relations between Roma and the majority offers little reason to be optimistic about an improvement in the current, dire situation.

The only clear thought to seep through the numbness and nausea after 22/7 was the relief that an ethnic Norwegian was responsible, writes Samtiden editor Cathrine Sandnes. Not because she feels vindicated, but because she is grateful for all the things that are not happening out on the streets.